...

... and they lie about it being 3G (which doesn't exist yet.)

It's a CDMA2000 phone which is 3G.

3G networks exist in many parts of the world, although behind schedule in other parts.

The whole "Cell Phones - The Next Generation" thing has been a pure marketing scam from the beginning. It's a popular well-funded scam that got lots of mindshare because it promised lots of people marketshare dominance or other political advantages, that they haven't executed well. But it makes a bunch of assumptions that the world can, will, and should have the same cellphone standard everywhere, and that the marketing people coming up with the term know what it is because they work for the people who are [pick hackneyed phrase here: A: the powerful beings creating the One Ringtone To Rule Them All, B: inevitably, scientific-central-planningally historically destined C: The Phone Company which is really in charge of everything D: the capitalist oligopoly conning our democratic central planners ] which everybody in the world will buy into, including manufacturers, system operators, regulators, and last and certainly least, those enthusiastic customers, and we'll all make scandalously high profits while giving consumers what we _know_ they want to pay tons of money for, because we know that the technology developers are ready to ship this stuff Real Soon Now, at the right price point, And of course, it assumes that everybody will believe that the products _these_ marketing people are trying to sell are the ones that will win, as opposed to the other technology developers who are making obviously substandard products unworthy of becoming CellPhones: TNG, and if somehow one of those other developers gets deployed in some significant market, they'll not only be stuck with some hackneyed name like "2.5G", but consumers will realize that those competing technologies are just opportunists who'll be Left Behind By Progress, so they either won't buy it or at least the wireless companies will dump it for Better Stuff Real Soon, or at least if there's more than one cell-phone company in an area, if the first one buys the 2.5G stuff, anybody else coming in with 3G can steal their customers. They're also depending on it taking long enough for 3G to get deployed and paid for and achieve World Domination that nobody's going to sneak in and call _their_ stuff 4G..... In practice, the real issues seem to be how fast a data channel is available, with the interesting values being 9600, 56k, 384k, 2M, how much spectrum space gets burned supporting it, how much distance you get for the voice and data cells, which standards interfere with which other standards, whether voice gets handled as something special or as data, whether data gets handled as something special like WAP or left as open-standard IP with TCP or UDP and HTTP, with or without being forced through filters or able to be sent through optional filters, how to integrate data transmission with texting (e.g. texting using ad-hoc telco standards or internet standards), how much jitter the data has (low values make VOIP possible), who's in charge of each of these services, which is to say "who gets how much of the money, if any", and how to get teenagers to have to buy it to be cool. These aren't the kind of things that easily fit into one linear range of values, and doing so is marketing scam.